The developments in electronic communications and digital processing of data have greatly increased the distribution of multi-media content such as video games, music, and movies in digital form. These various content types can be distributed electronically via downloads or installed on optical disks, solid state devices such as memory chips, etc. For example, digital audio, including commercial music recordings, have been distributed on Compact Disks (“CDs”), for some time, but the inability to practically store or communicate these relatively large data sets has precluded widespread copying and distribution of digitized media. The same is true for video games, where gaming systems such as gaming consoles or portable gaming systems did not comprise enough storage capacity to store a local copy of a video game.
However, advances in economical storage, high-speed communications and playback of a large amount of digital data has led to the digitizing of video games and other multi-media content including motion pictures, and distributing data sets that contain these types of content on optical disks as well as via electronic communications. Technology advances have also allowed the practical copying of these digital multi-media data sets onto writable media or the communications of these data sets among numerous people. The ability to reproduce original copies of digitized multimedia presentations, coupled with the increased ability to conveniently store and/or communicate the data, has lead to an increase in the copying, pirating and unauthorized sharing of digitized multi-media presentations. This unauthorized copying and distribution of digitized multi-media presentations has resulted in large losses to the owners of the copyrights in those presentations.
Protection techniques have been developed which support controlling different types of usage rights for a media data set. These systems, referred to as Digital Rights Management (“DRM”) Systems, are able to restrict access to data sets by limiting authorization to one or more types of usages of a data set in response to specified usage conditions. Access control in these systems is controlled through specified Digital Property Rights (“DPRs”). One example of a DPR is a right to only read a particular media data set for a specified number of times. Such a DPR may be used to provide a free or low cost demonstration of the multi-media data set. Existing systems support a variety of conditions on usage of the media data set and those conditions may be specified on a remote license server, but the available types of usages that may be authorized are fixed by the implementation and may not be flexibly varied by the owners of the copyright on a media data set.
The field of gaming systems and shared gaming environments sometimes requires rights management functions that are not provided by current DRM systems. As discussed above, current gaming systems (gaming consoles and/or portable gaming systems) comprise high capacity storage devices and wireless and/or wired communication technologies. Some gaming systems allow a user to create a local copy of a gaming title on his/her device. This is beneficial to a user since a user is no longer required to carry cartridges, optical disks, etc. comprising the gaming content. A user can have a library of games stored locally on his/her console or portable device. As can be seen, a user of current gaming systems is usually granted the right to make a local copy of a gaming title. DRM systems may permit a user to share the gaming title with friends so that they may also make local copies or play from a local copy. These additional users, however, can then utilize their local copies to interact with other users even though they did not purchase the gaming title.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.